Microsoft Wants to Ditch IE6 – But They Can’t

Let’s continue the browser talk for a while. Let’s move from the pinnacle of browsing, all the way down to the very drainage pit: Internet Explorer 6. To me, Internet Explorer 6 is that annoying zombie that just won’t die that chops off 80 of your health in a grueling midnight Left 4 Dead expert session. Microsoft may not say so outright, but they seem to be implying they agree with me.

Internet Explorer 6 made its way onto the internet 8 years ago, with the launch of Windows XP.Microsoft then failed miserably to keep their browser offering up to date, and it took the Mozilla guys to finally push Microsoft to get a move on and start working on IE again, which resulted in Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

Great stuff of course, but the problem now is that people just won’t upgrade to the newer versions of Internet Explorer, maybe because they are incapable (they’re not computer experts), or they’re working in a corporate environment which mandates Internet Explorer 6. Whatever the cause, it means IE6 is still the browser version with the largest marketshare.

You could argue – rightfully so – why Microsoft just doesn’t pull the plug on the damn thing? It’s 8 years old, the world has moved on, greener pastures are right around the corner. Well, the problem is that Internet Explorer 6 was part of Windows XP, and because of Microsoft’s extensive support pledges that come with its software, they are more less forced to support it.

While this may not be of much interest to home users, it’s different for corporations. These support pledges are part of the product they bought, and Microsoft can’t just cut them off. On top of that, cutting the support will make people consider alternatives – and that’s not what Microsoft wants.

“The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product,” Internet Explorer chief Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog post, “We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.”

He adds that as engineers, they want people to upgrade to the latest version, but that ultimately, the choice of upgrading should be made by the person who is responsible for the PC. It doesn’t take a whole lot of reading between-the-lines to realise that Microsoft wants to ditch IE6 just as much as the rest of the world – It’s just that they can’t.

But Microsoft’s problems with Internet Explorer 6 go deeper than that. Because of IE6, the name “Internet Explorer” is forever tainted. No matter how improved IE7 and 8 are, people will always think of IE6, and point and laugh. It might be time for Microsoft to ditch the Internet Explorer brand altogether, and come up with a completely new browser (or at least something rebranded, a-la Bing).

That’ll be the day.

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Microsoft didn’t expect web apps to outpace themselves. Basically, Firefox threw them for a duck. With 95% marketshare Microsoft expected web apps to be tied to Windows, IE & ActiveX. Then Firefox happened and now the innovation is happening outside their garden.

Microsoft’s own browser is holding them back. They cannot crate the same kinds of compelling apps like Google are with Wave.

They are having to resort to using Silverlight to patch up the browser holes in Office:Web 2010. I pity the development team–no SVG, no Canvas, no Video/Audio tags, wonky JS/DOM, lack of even basic CSS. It must be hell.

IE is going to haemorrhage marketshare no matter what MS do unless they can play by everybody else’s rules–and that means HTML5, Video-tag, SVG, decent JS speed and so on.

They are having to resort to using Silverlight to patch up the browser holes in Office:Web 2010. I pity the development team–no SVG, no Canvas, no Video/Audio tags, wonky JS/DOM, lack of even basic CSS. It must be hell.

Dont pity those guys they at least can whack the guy next office who did the bug.

Pity the myriads of developers outside of Microsoft who are forced to still support IE6 because their customers demand it.

If you still use IE6 because of your intranet, you should get your intranet updated, because you’ll be paying for IE6 anyway. Because when you want an other intranet-type site and still require IE6, you’ll be paying extra to have it be fixed and butchered to work with IE6.

I pity the development team–no SVG, no Canvas, no Video/Audio tags, wonky JS/DOM, lack of even basic CSS. It must be hell. IE is going to haemorrhage marketshare no matter what MS do unless they can play by everybody else’s rules–and that means HTML5, Video-tag, SVG, decent JS speed and so on.

SVG? So what… silverlight gives you vector graphics.

Canvas… so what… silverlgiht dev does not need it

Video/AUdio? silverlight gives it to you

JS/DOM… so what… I have C# and .net

CSS…. silverlight maintains my layout for me accross browsers.

.net and xml based vector graphics…. beats teh crap out of HTML 5 and JS/DOM

.net and xml based vector graphics…. beats teh crap out of HTML 5 and JS/DOM

And all of it is the same old non-standardized crap some of us loathe Microsoft for.

The problems with Microsoft are not so often technical ones, but their constant, neverending attempts to control the internet protocols.

There was closed-source binary-only flash video capability. W3C agreed on working out a standard for video, but along coms Microsoft and presents us: SIlverlight! ANOTHER framework which is as annoying for the world as flash, without offering the slightest advantage over existing fully specified and already freely implemented standards.

If something like Google’s wave client can be programmed in JavaScript, then what the hell is Microsoft trying to do with Siverlight?

No sane Software company will use Silverlight to reach 60% – 80% of the potential customers, when they can have 100% with JS.

I have a confession to make. I, an admin of Linux desktops, dedicated to Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and all that sort of rot, am in a position of supporting IE6’s presence on the Internet.

How did this strange state of affairs come about? Well, it’s a sad and sordid tale. Microsoft was so successful in promoting IE6 that a number of business critical sites, which my clients need to use every day in order to conduct their core business, absolutely require IE. I was forced, kicking and screaming, into providing IE6 under Crossover Office to my users. (There was simply no other way. And believe me, I looked for one.) Until recently… the only supported version of IE was IE6. IE7 is now “supported”. But it doesn’t work worth a damn.

So every time one of my users goes out with IE6 to one of these sites, we are casting another vote for IE6 on the web. AND THERE’S NOT A DAMNED THING I CAN DO ABOUT IT! Can you hear my resentment?

Oh, we use Epiphany as our primary browser. And I sternly discourage the use of IE for anything that does not require it. But it still makes me feel dirty, that despite all my best intentions it has come to this.

On the subject of Evil applications that Microsoft has created over the years that they are trying to get away from… Outlook. While most already know that IE6 was the epitome of evil in the Browser world, with it’s lackluster support for standards. Outlook is just as bad, and realistically only useful when you’re using it in a flat out Microsoft environment.

It really doesn’t work that well with a Postfix and Courier set up. Having strange enough issues that require a reboot to fix them.

And much like IE6, I think MS is trying to kill it off. In fact, a recent update forced Outlook express to change it’s language to Russian of all things. And there was no fix. They basically said “Outlook Express is no longer supported.” Good, there is a decent enough version of Evolution for Windows now. Or Thunderbird. Use those!

I don’t agree that they’re trying to kill outlook, infact they’re releasing an outlook, not entourage, but an outlook for the upcoming mac office (I think 2010). As for outlook express, it’s already dead, even windows mail in vista is as good as dead, windows live mail is what they’re pushing now for a free mail client.

FWIW, Outlook and Outlook express tend to behave well with postfix and dovecot provided a few options are set server side to deal with some of their quirks. Occasionally we’ll see a stray outlook process that hoses up send/receive and has to be killed off manually to get outlook working again.

MS never actually promoted IE6, which was pretty much a maintenance release (they basically stopped treating ie like a product after destroying netscape, and didnt start again until FF got a sizable market share)

The problem with big corporations that have small, crappy IT departments is that those small, crappy IT departments don’t like to vet new software. Because of that, for a very long time IE6 was pretty much the only browser guaranteed to be available in a corporate setting. What makes the situation worse is while this browser war is about standards compliance, the last one was about proprietary extensions. Nowadays it is pretty trivial to support everyone, and if you don’t you are throwing away a significant amount of potential users. Back then it was a royal pain, especially with “enterprisey” applications that are wildly complex with loads of javascript.

There was a large poll a few months ago asking people why they were still on IE6, and the three main reasons were that they weren’t allowed, didn’t have admin access, or didn’t know how to upgrade. At this point, nobody is really using it because they want to, they use it because they have to.

Am I the only one that finds the constant IE6-bashing on the Internet a little old? I mean, sure, an 8 year old browser is old. But when it was released, it was well ahead of its competition: consider that in Aug 2001, competing browsers were Netscape 6.1, Netscape 4.79, and Mozilla 0.9.2.1. This effect is even more pronounced going back to IE 5.0.

The fact that IE6 is in widespread usage reflects that, developer frustrations aside, for many users, it was/is a very good browser. Developing for Netscape 4.79 would be infinitely harder; it is not done today because IE6 is, well, better, so it survived much longer.

I’d even question whether the AJAX-based web we have today would have been possible if Microsoft had settled on “matching” Netscape 4.x rather than comprehensively raising the bar on it.

For me, IE6 will stay for a while, because it’s the last version of IE that runs on NT 4, 98, and Windows 2000. For some users, upgrading to IE7/8 is not an option.

Also note that the oldest browser MS supports is IE 5.01 (the release that shipped with Windows 2000, which is still supported.)

Yeah, Thoms editorial reads like he wasn’t actually using computers when XP came out. IE6 was fantastic compared to IE 5.5, which was a significant part of the reason why windows ME sucked so bad when it first came out.

I’m no fan of IE (or the circumstances surrounding it), and have spent most of the last decade avoiding it.

However, it has spurred the development of high-quality alternatives by creating a relatively high minimum bar for newcomers. It enabled me to choose between good browsers, rather than make do with poor ones. Even for a longstanding IE-hater like me, I’d view the demise of IE6 more like, “farewell, and by the way, thanks for founding the modern Internet.” It will never be zombie to me.

Indeed, I even recall that with IE6.0, you were able to upgrade to 128-bit encryption, though you had to do that yourself somewhere.

Despite all my hassles with Windows XP in the pre-SP1 days (the very days that made me turn my back on Windows altogether), I actually found IE6 to be “better” than IE4.x or IE5. Sure, it had a slow loading time, but so did every other application. Sure it had leaks, but Windows Update was adequate at that time.

Of course, Microsoft has moved on after IE6, but I agree with the above author that IE6 was not “bad” or “evil”. It was just another Microsoft product, that (just as Vista) is bashed and trampled in retrospect. Get over it and update your browser. Or switch.

The fact that IE6 is in widespread usage reflects that, developer frustrations aside, for many users, it was/is a very good browser.

The market share of a product often has nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to do with the quality of that product. Add in the whole reason IE got popular to begin with, breaking antitrust laws by packing it in with an operating system that had/has a monopoly, and you get the point… it got where it was not by quality, but by piggybacking on Windows’ monopoly. Using one monopoly to create another.

I say KILL IE 6. I don’t get why Microsoft will upgrade the entire OS for a service pack, yet, when it comes to the browser… nooooo, that’s a purely optional upgrade. Seriously, what the ****? Even Microsoft admitted (or was that just to thwart the judge to help with their antitrust lawsuit?) that IE is *part of Windows*. So why didn’t they just ship upgrades as a part of the XP service packs? It would save those people’s time who just want to be more secure (even if they never touch IE directly).

IE is the main reason I still don’t think Microsoft cares about security as much as they say they do. Windows 7 is looking much better than XP at this point, though… but then, it thankfully comes with an up-to-date (and therefore, more secure) browser.

The fact that IE6 is in widespread usage reflects that, developer frustrations aside, for many users, it was/is a very good browser. Developing for Netscape 4.79 would be infinitely harder; it is not done today because IE6 is, well, better, so it survived much longer.

It has survived to this day because stupid people keep on using it. My father used it for years and years. He said no point to change because it has worked in the past, too. I promoted Firefox to him. I made my own website that blocked all IEs and threw a link at him. He chose to install Firefox (after asking if it has viruses), visited my website, and went back to IE.

He did not even want to install a Firefox to my granny’s new computer. “Because your grandmother has used IE6 before.” The machine had IE7 come with updates. He claimed it’s much more IE6-alike than Firefox is. Pretty much proves how much the name of the product means instead of the product.

Luckily, the IE7 was all crap on that machine. It crashed when it needed to load a certain plugin. I told him I won’t fix it, because it’s Internet Explorer. So he installed a Firefox for my granny. She never complained. She had so little experience of computers she didn’t have any ties to any browser. It’s all just pressing back and forward buttons and clicking links. She had previously switched to Thunderbird (the mail app) because I broke up Outlook Express. No complaints there either.

I recently visited my dad’s place and found out he has switched to Firefox at least on his second PC. Progress comes slow but steadily.

Am I the only one that finds the constant IE6-bashing on the Internet a little old? I mean, sure, an 8 year old browser is old. But when it was released, it was well ahead of its competition: consider that in Aug 2001, competing browsers were Netscape 6.1, Netscape 4.79, and Mozilla 0.9.2.1. This effect is even more pronounced going back to IE 5.0.

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Oh well yes I agree and Britney Spears rose to stardom and tanked her career while IE6 persisted.

Times move on, IE6 was good at its time, but nowadays it is a costly bug ridden piece of software you are forced to support with lots of extra time which is hardly to justify anymore!

It is like having to support windows 98 while having to use the latest directx stuff and having to backport everything from DirectX10 because the users insist of having the same graphics on their windows 98 machines!

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The fact that IE6 is in widespread usage reflects that, developer frustrations aside, for many users, it was/is a very good browser. Developing for Netscape 4.79 would be infinitely harder; it is not done today because IE6 is, well, better, so it survived much longer.

Guess what, many users simply do not care they just want a working interface, for them even ie 5.5 worked as well, they have their gripes however with the braindead UI of ie7+.

The users do not care about engines and what they can do, they just want to surf the web, and while we are at it, the want the latest shiny things mostly running on their stone old browsers!

Things move on and I am glad that big sites slowly but surely give users a smack on their head to update their browsers.

I personally think that IE6 is on its way out the browser statistics clearly show it, in some areas it already is below 10% and that is the critical threshold public sites slowly start to phase out browser support it becomes to costly to maintain.

You already can see it with the warning signs already popping up in even big sites.

Those who have to stick to IE6 will either have to additionally install Firefox or Opera, or will have a rough time ahead. Not that they will loose content, but they will wonder why the internet does not work like it used to do (user terms for browsing)

Hey, they monopolisticly muscled in as the browser by default. The browser for those who don’t know what one is. Now why would this segment upgrade? IE6 will be around as long XP is around and only Windows 7 (and 8) or a deterioration of Windows(OS) market share can change that.

Finding out that your browser does not support important Web sites should be a good motivator for people to update their browser (or to finally be courageous enough to ask a tech friend to do it for them).

According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=3, IE7 was the most used version of any web browser on the Internet for over 6 months. Users must have upgraded to IE8 faster from IE7 than from IE6. So IE6 is now the most used browser version only since mid-May. Unfortunately, by extrapolating the trends, IE6 will probably remain the most used version until near the end of 2009 when IE8 will overtake it.

Another interesting observation is that this is the first time in years that no browser version has greater than 30% market share.

I hope that one of these years Opera will really take off. I don’t endorse the views of the company, but I really like their browser.

And it will change even faster with the arrival of Windows 7 on newly sold machines.

As far as I know, Microsoft will put a browser selection tool into Windows 7, which lets people decide which browser(s) to install. IE marketshare will drop, because most (less technical) people will simply choose the first option known to them, and IE is behind both Chrome and Firefox.

The reason it’s so popular with corporate users has everything to do with Microsoft making it very easy to make browser plug-ins using Visual Basic or Visual C++. IE6 was the first browser where the plug-ins actually worked as advertised on a somewhat stable platform. IE 4, 5, and 5.5 were different degrees of horrible when it came to browser plug-ins compared to IE6, and that’s saying a lot.

This meant that the very large developer community that is well-versed in writing VB/VC++ applications was able to easily transition over to writing browser plug-ins for IE.

People forget that AJAX and all of the really good client-side DHTML/HTML5/AJAX frameworks just weren’t there yet, and adding some plug-ins and the ability to easily call OCX files made development of complex “web” apps really easy.

Of course they were also varying degrees of insecure. When Microsoft started trying to clean up the mess they made of it with IE7, a lot of the shortcuts that were in place that enabled such plug-ins to exist, and to easily have them call DLLs on PCs started getting blocked off.

Many of the applications in corporate America were built to run on IE6 using said plug-ins, which include Oracle JInitiator, Crystal Reports/Business Objects, GE Centricity, help desk software, various printing plug-ins, and a very large amount of bespoke code written by in-house developers. These in-house developers are/were the largest users of Microsoft products, and many of them are trained as something else and picked up VB on the side.

I suspect that Microsoft will be finding a way to even have IE6 run way past 2015 in some way, shape, or form for some of these users by using XP Mode in Windows 7 and its successor operating systems. You can run IE6 and some plug-ins now on WINE, but that’s taking chances.

The reason why is because that code runs some critical aspect of someone’s business, and they’re not going to change it unless they absolutely have to.

Actually corporate users will be served by xp vms in the long run. Windows 7 ultimate will get one of those. Fortunately this is painful enough that IE6 will get a reputation as being slow as hell to start and to use in the long run and users will migrate away even more privately.

So it is a win win situation. Corporations can use their ie6 stuff even when migrating to Windows 7 but no one outside of the corporate context wants to use it that way.

I wonder, does everyone still using IE6 also use SP1 or SP2? IE8, and previously 7, is a “critical update” in Microsoft Update. Does Microsoft also support computers on SP1?

I am also going to jump on the bandwagon of users who say IE6 was good for its time. It totally beat the IE versions in 98 and ME, and was way better than that bloated Netscape. It was also very good sometime after IE7 was released because that browser was slow and had even more problems until they fixed it up.

Anyways, IE6 is not like a Windows version. It’s just a freaking browser. IE8 even has a compatibility mode for those damn websites and programs that haven’t been updated in nearly a decade.

If the Businesses know that their products don’t work on IE 7 or 8 or any other modern browser, then they should make some decisions….

1. Redo their software to work with the standards and learn there lesson about using non-standards compliant software methods.

2. Keep using IE 6 But don’t complain if new pages are going to look and work like crap. As you realize you are using OLD technology and you really need to upgrade.

Most of these cases are just policy vs. real technical details it isn’t as much as it won’t work in IE 7 or 8 but they just wont try to see if it does.

Web Developers should really stop catering to the IE 6 Users. Even if Microsoft wont Web Developers should. If it doesn’t work then they ned to up grade, you are loosing out by keeping IE 6 (more difficult to code HTML, lack of newer features etc…)

I prefer to run a lean and mean version of XP with no unnecessary baggage. Going beyond IE6 means installing the .NET bloatware, which I refuse to do. Besides, for me, IE6 serves it purpose. I only ever use it to access the windows update site and a few other trusted sites that refuse to support Firefox. If I had a choice I would just delete IE6 from my system and use nothing but Firefox.

Microsoft may heavily promote it, but nowhere during the IE7 or IE8 install process does it even ask to install .NET.

Perhaps Windows Update promotes .NET after you have IE7+? But still, it’s not listed as a critical update.

I installed IE7 not long after it originally came out (did it through Windows Update) and it definitely installed the .NET baggage so I removed it all and went back to IE6. After you posted your reply I decided to give IE8 a try. This time I did the install via the “Download” link on the IE8 website instead of through Windows Update and that install is definitely without .NET as you indicated. Thanks!

IE 6 and XP will teach Microsoft not to leave it so long in between upgrades. People don’t want to move away from IE 6 and nobody wants to move away from XP, because they’ve grown so used to them both in 8 years.

No matter how improved IE7 and 8 are, people will always think of IE6, and point and laugh. It might be time for Microsoft to ditch the Internet Explorer brand altogether, and come up with a completely new browser (or at least something rebranded, a-la Bing).

What people, the IT nerds? I would say IE is pretty good name because it has Internet in name, so it’s easy recognize as browser (the good ol “I deleted the Internet” joke). Look how long it has taken Mozilla to create Firefox brand. Ask few years ago what Firefox was and your mum would say red fox. Now even the granny knows what Firefox is, it’s a panda.

Quite frankly I think Apple has most genius name, Safari. Take a trip to wild life called Internet. Or maybe that tobacco wasn’t just tobacco…

Many big corporations use the latest IE by default. How about msft putting the rendering engine from IE7 into IE6 and let it present itself as IE6.1 in request headers? Then web development can get easier and the step to IE7+ is smaller.

Some ppl seems to stick with IE6 because it’s more lightweight, they like the GUI better and because they have an old pirate copy of w2k/xp without wanting to enable Windows Update. It would be nice if these use cases would be fulfilled too.

At my work IE6 is the *standard*. Installing IE7 or IE8 is a big ‘no no’.

On the plus side we also offer Firefox as a standard now and I’d say we have reached a nice point where 95% of our enterprise intranet applications run just fine in Firefox. Only a few (under 10) that still REQUIRE IE6 and we are working on those every day.

I fully expect to see Firefox become the primary standard and IE7/8 become the ‘other option’ at some point in the future at work. we are not a small company either – over 100k employees.

Enterprises can get off the IE6 treadmill if they are willing to put in the work and see the value of the investment.